Madam, - The time has come to pay more attention to the full text of Yeats's poem In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markiewicz.
Caitriona Clear (August 5th) argues that Constance and Eva are horribly traduced by everlasting association with Yeats's evocation of them as young women at Lissadell House. But as she should know, Yeats is less than affectionate in his memorial poem.
His sentimental opening lines may be what make the verse and the house remain in the memory of casual readers, but the poem in full describes the careers of both women in disenchanted terms - "conspiring among the ignorant", seeking "some vague utopia", involved in "All the folly of a fight/ With a common wrong or right".
He conjures up their fate dragging out lonely years or as withered, old and skeletal examples of their own politics; they may be "dear shadows", but for the "great gazebo" which seems to be the result of their struggle he offers a conflagration - "Arise and bid me strike a match/ And strike another till time catch". Here, surely, is where it could be suggested that they, and their sympathisers who may have included Yeats for a time, were traduced.
Scholars may differ about the identity of the great gazebo, and of the conflagration, although for Ms Clear's argument both might fit Lissadell itself. (Incidentally, her suggestion that the sisters are also misrepresented as "Irish Mitfords" is inaccurate in terms of the Mitford sisters too.)
There are other reasons why the State need not assist in the rescue of Lissadell - the chief one being that there are other Lissadells awaiting rescue in Ireland - but it is demeaning for either side in the debate to assume that the romanticism of an introductory image is all that there is to the house, or in this case to the poem. - Yours, etc.,
MARY LELAND,
Blackrock,
Co Cork.
Madam, - Anyone who has read Eva Gore-Booth and Esther Roper by Gifford Lewis (1989) will know that Lissadell House may have been a haven for W.B. Yeats, but for the sisters it was a place of captivity from which to escape to get to work.
They would certainly not wish taxpayers' money to be wasted on it. - Yours, etc.,
MÁIRE MULLARNEY, Main Street, Rathfarnham, Dublin 14.